Science & climate: studies & reports

Here are links to articles mentioned on the FM site about science and nature. I believe this will be one of the major factors affecting geopolitics in the 21st century. The primary message I hope people take from this list of articles — and the posts based upon them — is that there is debate among scientists about these things — and that the science is rapidly progressing to provide answers.

Most of these (not all) are from professional journals or technically oriented websites. For more information see these related Reference Pages on the FM sites:

(a) The #1 site IMO: The Discovery of Global Warming, on the site of the American Institute of Physics — “A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.”

This Website created by Spencer Weart supplements his much shorter book, which tells the history of climate change research as a single story. On this Website you will find a more complete history in dozens of essays on separate topics, updated annually.

(b) Lists of articles with full citations:

A timeline of the science and politics of climate science (from the AIP site)

“Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics”, Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner, published at ARXIV (run by Cornell, co-funded by the NSF), July 2007, updated September 2007 (114 pages) — Abstract; full PDF.

Report of the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Hockey Stick Global Climate Reconstruction”, commissioned by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (July 2006) — aka The Wegman Report. Also note this excerpt from the Q&A session of the Dr. Edward J. Wegman’s testimony.

“Abrupt Climate Change”, Final Report, Synthesis and Assessment Product 3.4″, U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research. Participating Agencies: USGS, NOAA and the NSF. December 2008. Home page is here.

“Sudden stratospheric warmings seen in MINOS deep underground muon data”, S. M. Osprey et al., Geophysical Research Letters, in press — See the press release from the National Centre for Atmospheric Sciece for details.

“Enlightening Global Dimming and Brightening“, Martin Wild, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, January 2012 — “Recent research on the phenomenon of substantial decadal variation in sunlight received at Earth’s surface reveals far-reaching environmental implications and proposes a conceptual framework which ties it to prevailing atmospheric aerosol levels.”

“Gray Literature in the IPCC TAR“, Andreas Bjurström, 5 March 2010 — “Bibliometric analysis “shows that the claim that the IPCC rely mainly on peer review scientific articles is true for working group 1, partly true for working group 2 and false for working group 3.”

“Swedes call out Jones on data availability“, press release from the Stockholm Initiative corrects false statement by Phil Jones to Parliament, 5 March 2010 — Swedish meteorological data is available to the public, not a valid excuse for Jones failure to honor Freedom of Information Act requests.

(10) Articles about the battle for release of climate science data and methods

“Emulating Mannian CPS“, Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, 2 December 2008 – The struggle continues to get “hockey stick” Mann’s computer to code to work. Only then can Mann’s work be replicated. Odd that it appears in peer-reviewed journals; one wonders what “reviewed” means when the code does not run.

Article in Japanese by Junsei Kondo, Professor emeritus of Tohoku University with results of his survey of Japan’s stations (supposedly only 3 of the 100+ stations meet standard criteria for adequacy) (source).

Preliminary results of the SurfaceStation.org survy of USHCN; 67% completed — only 11% are in the top 2 categories.

Proxies (e.g., ice core samples) — Note these are only indirect measures of temperature. Here is a large archive of discussions.

“OK, What Caused the Problem?“, Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, 16 November 2008 — About the latest major error discovered in the latest GHCN (NASA0 – GISS (NOAA) glitch. Their response to notification of the error is as significant as the error itself.

“On the decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century“, S. J. Holgate, Geophysical Research Letters, 4 January 2007 — “The rate of sea level change was found to be larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003). The highest decadal rate of rise occurred in the decade centred on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) with the lowest rate of rise occurring in the decade centred on 1964 (−1.49 mm/yr). Over the entire century the mean rate of change was 1.74 ± 0.16 mm/yr.”